Schiavone’s wife threatened to divorce him if he signed with WWE

AEW commentator Tony Schiavone was the guest on this week’s AEW Unrestricted podcast.

Schiavone recalled getting an offer from WWE back in 2019, and how Cody Rhodes persuaded him to reject WWE’s deal. Schiavone also got threatened by his wife into rejecting the deal.

Here’s what he said:

“Bruce told me at the beginning of 2019. He said, ‘I’m going to go back and work for Vince’, and this was January 2019, and he said, ‘if you give me like a few months, I will contact you because I think you can come and work here.’

He did contact me on a Sunday in the summertime of that year, and he said, ‘Vince wants you to come back and work for us.’ And I said, ‘Great, what are we talking about?’ He said, ‘We still don’t know yet, but we know we’d like for you to be a producer because we know you like to produce and you like to work behind the scenes. We’ll be back in touch. I said, ‘got it.’ You get an offer like that, and you’re thinking, ‘Man, things may be on the way up.’

So, do I call my wife, no! I call Conrad (Thompson). I said, ‘I just got offered a job from the WWE, and he said, ‘That’s great.’ I hung up the phone. Two minutes later, I got a text from Cody. Cody said, I don’t want you to work for the WWE, and I said, ‘Okay, good.’ That’s all I said. And then he said will you accept a call from Tony Khan. I said, sure. Tony called me. We talked for an hour, over an hour.

I knew immediately I wanted to work there (AEW). And I also had a wife of mine, we’ve been married now for 39 years, and she told me ‘You take a job back with WWE, I’m going to divorce your a$$.’”